OK, maybe 10 years from now. Many of us will, hopefully, be around, so it's interesting to imagine what ways we'll be writing programs then. What will be the issues that programming languages currently are not good at addressing, but which we must face in response to the demands of our customers in the near future?
That is one question David Gelernter and Nicolas Carriero ponder in this piece for the ACM Communications. They discuss the notion of symmteric programming langues, the separation between coordination and programming languages, and outline "A Computational Model of Everything." A fascinating read.
Ack! Too bad it is in Adobe's horribly flawed PDF format. When I tried to look at it, it barks about some "colorspace" not being found and then shows the first page in black-on-black. Hopefully we won't be seeing any more of Acrobat ten years from now -- I'm surprised it is even still around today.